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The Rise of K 12 Blended Learning
The Rise of K 12 Blended Learning
With contributions from Alex Hernandez, Bryan Hassel, and Joe Ableidinger
January 2011
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n Disrupting Class,1 the authors project that by 2019, 50 percent of all high school courses will be delivered online. This pattern of growth is characteristic of a disruptive innovationan innovation that transforms a sector characterized by products or services that are complicated,
expensive, inaccessible, and centralized into one with products or services that are simple, affordable, accessible, convenient, and often customizable. Think personal computers, the iPod and mp3s, Southwest Airlines, and TurboTax. At the beginning of any disruptive innovation, the new technology takes root in areas of nonconsumptionwhere the alternative is nothing at all, so the simple, new innovation is infinitely better. More users adopt it as the disruptive innovation predictably improves. Online learning fits the pattern. It started by serving students in circumstances where there is no alternative for learningin the advanced courses that many schools struggle to offer inhouse; in small, rural, and urban schools that are unable to offer a broad set of courses with highly qualified teachers in certain subject areas; in remedial courses for students who need to recover credits to graduate; and with home-schooled and homebound students. Nearly all of these instances tended to be in distance-learning environments initiallyoutside of a traditional school environment and removed from an in-person teacher. A simultaneous explosion in home schoolingfrom roughly 800,000 students in 1999 to roughly 2 million todaywas fueled by the rise of online learning and full-time virtual schools. There is a limit, however, to the number of students in America who have the ability to be home-schooled or attend a full-time virtual school. The same analysis that shows that 50 percent of all high school courses will be delivered online by 2019 reveals that home schooling and full-
Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, and Curtis W. Johnson, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008).
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time virtual schooling will not substitute for mainstream schooling, as their rapid growth flattens out at around 10 percent of the K12 schooling population.2 In classic disruptive fashion, online learning is expanding beyond distance
Home schooling and full-time virtual schooling will serve 10 percent of students at most Bleak budgets and teacher shortages create the need for blended learning to rethink the structure and delivery of education
learning. Educators and entrepreneurs are increasingly creating blended-learning environmentswhere rather than doing the online learning at a distance, students learn online in an adult-supervised school environment for at least part of the time. At the outset, this occurred in areas of nonconsumption, such as credit-recovery labs and dropout-recovery schools. A small but growing number of schools, however, are now starting to introduce blended learning into their core programming for mainstream students. Bleak budgets coupled with looming teacher shortages amidst an increasing demand for results are accelerating the growth of online learning into blended environments. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently described a new normal, where schools would have to do more with less. Blended learning is playing a vital role, as school operators begin to rethink the structure and delivery of education with the new realities of public funding. The growth of online learning in brick-and-mortar schools carries with it a bigger opportunity that has not existed in the past with education technology, which has been treated as an add-on to the current education system and conventional classroom structure. Online learning has the potential to be a disruptive force that will transform the factory-like, monolithic structure that has dominated Americas schools into a new model that is student-centric, highly personalized for each learner, and more productive, as it delivers dramatically better results at the same or lower cost. Policymakers and education leaders must adopt the right policies for this to happen. There is a significant risk that the existing education system will co-opt online learning as it blends it into its current flawed modeland, just as is the case now, too few students will receive an excellent education. State elected officials, district
Home and full-time virtual schooling requires significant parental involvement. Given the socioeconomic condition and family structures for most K12 students, 10 percent is likely the maximum number of students who could even contemplate a home-schooling experience. The majority of students in America need schoolor a supervised place to learn. Various societal stakeholders hire schools to do many things for their children, just one of which is learning. A custodial job keeping children safeis equally important for many. From the perspective of many children, having a place to have fun with friends is also vital. The Rise of K12 Blended Learning | 2
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superintendents, and school principals must act now to prevent the cramming of online learning into the traditional system and to foster its transformative potential. As policymakers open the gates for innovation by creating zones with increased autonomy, they must simultaneously hold providers accountable for results so that the adoption of online learning leads to radically better outcomes for students.
This definition is from the perspective of a student. For example, in the self-blend model below, because a student is taking some courses online remotely and some courses in the traditional brickand-mortar format, that student is experiencing blended learning. By specifying that the online learning must have some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace, this definition excludes examples where the teacher uses an electronic white board with online curriculum to lecture to a classroom of students or instances where students use online textbooks instead of hardcopy ones. Innosight Institute started with an overview of 60 organizations (including states, districts, schools, for-profits, charters, start-ups, and independent schools) that were starting to blend online learning into schools. From this list, it interviewed 38 operators, representing 44 distinct programs, and created in-depth profiles. These 44 programs were not an exhaustive representation, rather a sample of emerging early adopters. The profiles unearthed clear patterns.
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The programs profiled in this study, which will be released in its full form in the spring of 2011, were highly varied in the way that students experienced their learning across several dimensions, including teacher roles, scheduling, physical space, and delivery methods. The models fell into six distinct clusters, however, with each sharing design elements that distinguished them from the others. Figure 1 offers brief examples of these models. As innovators develop new versions of blended learning, the contours of these clusters will continue to evolve. For now, blended learning is gravitating toward six models:6
Model 1: Face-to-Face Driver
The programs that fit in the face-to-face-driver category all retain face-to-face teachers to deliver most of their curricula. The physical teacher deploys online learning on a case-by-case basis to supplement or remediate, often in the back of the classroom or in a technology lab.
Model 2: Rotation
The common feature in the rotation model is that, within a given course, students rotate on a fixed schedule between learning online in a one-to-one, self-paced environment and sitting in a classroom with a traditional face-to-face teacher. It is the model most in between the traditional face-to-face classroom and online learning because it involves a split between the two and, in some cases, between remote and onsite. The face-to-face teacher usually oversees the online work.
Model 3: Flex
Programs with a flex model feature an online platform that delivers most of the curricula. Teachers provide on-site support on a flexible and adaptive as-needed basis through in-person tutoring sessions and small group sessions. Many dropoutrecovery and credit-recovery blended programs fit into this model.7
This is a first cut at creating a more precise typology of blended-learning models than has existed before. It is still imperfect, as readers will note. We invite other researchers to conduct further research to improve upon these typologies. Others have introduced their own blended-learning categorization schemes. A few of them cite dropout recovery as a distinct model. The problem with these types of categorization schemes is that they confuse model with purpose. Dropout-recovery programs have a clear and uniform purpose, but many use different models to achieve this purpose. Many use the flex model; some are full-time virtual programs; still others utilize the online-driver model, for example. The Rise of K12 Blended Learning | 4
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Rotation
Flex
San Francisco Flex Academy Miami-Dade County Public Schools (iPrep Academy)
Online Lab
Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (Virtual Learning) Riverside Unified School District (Riverside Virtual School) Florida Virtual School Jesuit Virtual Learning Academy All online schools that offer a la carte courses that can be taken remotely EPGY Online High School Northern Humboldt Union High School (Learning Centers)
Self-Blend
Online Driver
Students at albuquerque Public schools eCadeMY meet with a face-to-face teacher at the beginning of the course. If they maintain at least a C grade, they are free to complete the rest of the course online and remotely, although some choose to use the onsite computer labs.
The online-lab model characterizes programs that rely on an online platform to deliver the entire course but in a brick-and-mortar lab environment. Usually these programs provide online teachers. Paraprofessionals supervise, but offer little content expertise. Often students that participate in an online-lab program also take traditional courses and have typical block schedules.
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Model 5: Self-Blend
The nearly ubiquitous version of blended learning among American high schools is the self-blend model, which encompasses any time students choose to take one
Blended learnings potential: Personalize learning Boost productivity
or more courses online to supplement their traditional schools catalog. The online learning is always remote, which distinguishes it from the online-lab model, but the traditional learning is in a brick-and-mortar school. All supplemental online schools that offer a la carte courses to individual students facilitate self-blending.
Model 6: Online Driver
The online-driver model involves an online platform and teacher that deliver all curricula. Students work remotely for the most part. Face-to-face check-ins are sometimes optional and other times required. Some of these programs offer brickand-mortar components as well, such as extracurricular activities.
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of costs and where only a fraction of students have access to great teachers.8 Teachers shifting to blended-learning models are finding that they have more time to focus on high-value activities like critical thinking, writing, and projectbased learning as they spend less time on low-value, manual tasks. These opportunities to innovate can occur even as providers take advantage of the things that leading brick-and-mortar schools do well, such as creating a strong, supportive culture that promotes rigor and high expectations for all students, as well as providing healthy, supportive relationships and mentorship.
Carpe Diem, example of rotation model: 60 percent of students are eligible for free or reducedprice lunch Less expensive to operate Ranked first in its county in math and reading
Carpe Diem began as a traditional, state charter school serving 280 students in grades 6 to 12. But when it lost its building lease eight years ago, Carpe Diem had to slash its budget and question every assumption about what a school should look like. It turned to blended learning. A large room filled with 280 cubicles with computerssimilar in layout to a call centersits in the middle of Carpe Diems current building. Students rotate every 55 minutes between self-paced online learning in this large learning center and faceto-face instruction in traditional classrooms. When students are learning online in
Over the last 40 years, education policy has actually striven to make labor productivity decline, as student-teacher ratios have fallen from 22.3 to 15.5. Public Impact has proposed a range of strategies, including the use of blended learning, to extend the reach of great teachers to more students. See 3X for All: Extending the Reach of Educations Best and Opportunity at the Top: How Americas Best Teachers Could Close the Gaps, Raise the Bar, and Keep Our Nation Great, available at www.opportunityculture.org.
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the learning center, paraprofessionals offer instant direction and help as students encounter difficulties. In the traditional classroom, a teacher re-teaches, enhances, and applies the material introduced online. Students attend class four days a week, although the days are longer (7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.). Only students who need extra assistance come to the school on Friday. Carpe Diem hires only six full-time certified teachers: one each for math, language arts, science, physical education, social studies, and electives. Each teacher assumes responsibility for all of the students in the school for his or her subject expertise; for example, the math teacher alone provides all face-to-face math instruction that the 273 students receive throughout the week, no matter the course. With only six certified teachers plus the support staff of assistant coaches, guidance counselors, aides, and administrators, the savings are substantial, which allows Carpe Diem to pay its teachers at or above district salaries with a better benefit plan than that of other schools in the area. In addition, Carpe Diems new building, opened in 2006, only includes five traditional classrooms, which is fewer than half as many as a traditional school requires for a similar enrollment level. The building cost $2.7 million to build, whereas a nearby school building currently in the planning stages will cost roughly $12 million and accommodate only 200 more students than Carpe Diemover 2.5 times more expensive per student.9 Rocketship Education, an elementary charter management organization with three schools in San Jose, Calif., has increased productivity in some similar ways as Carpe Diem through its blended modeland it, too, has had stellar results closing the achievement gap for low-income Hispanic students who are predominantly English Language Learners. In 2010, Rocketships two schools were the highestperforming low-income elementary schools in Santa Clara County and ranked in the top 15 among all California schools with low-income populations of at least 70 percent (86 percent of Rocketships students were English Language Learners and 88 percent qualified for free or reduced-price lunch in 2010).10 Rocketship has a learning lab in which students use online learning programs in math and reading while paraprofessionals supervise. Students attend one block of
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Interview with Rick Ogston, Executive Director of Carpe Diem Collegiate High School, interview by Heather Staker, August 24, 2010. Second Rocketship School Catapults into Top 15 with Outstanding Student Achievement, Rocketship Education, September 13, 2010. The Rise of K12 Blended Learning | 8
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Learning Lab along with one block of Math/Science and two blocks of Literacy/ Social Studies each day. Because Learning Lab does not have certified teachers, Rocketship can reduce staffing by five teachers, which saves resources. It then reinvests those in areas like teacher training, academic intervention programs, and leadership development. Other blended-learning operators are taking different paths to increasing productivity and efficiency by disaggregating the role of the teacher. Some, for example, use a mix of online teachers, who are in charge of academic content; in-person mentors who work with students and their families throughout their high-school careers; and in-person relevance managers, who help students apply learning in projects or internships. In many cases, blended learning is giving schools opportunities to re-think the role of teachers in profound ways that better serve students and increase job satisfaction.
Personalizing learning
Rocketship, example of rotation model: 88 percent of students are eligible for free or reducedprice lunch Uses efficiencies to invest in teacher training, academic intervention programs Schools are highestperforming lowincome schools in county
In the Carpe Diem learning center, if a student struggles for more than three minutes with a concept, the e2020 system (e2020 is the online-learning content provider) alerts an assistant coach, who responds with immediate, on-the-spot help. This simple alert motivates students to stay on task and helps resolve problems quickly. Rather than slapping a failing grade on a report card at the end of a course, Carpe Diems system helps students experience repeated, frequent successes. Carpe Diem works each day with students to make sure that they master each small increment of learning. Just as in a video game, students do not move on to the next level or unit until they have passed. As students move through each task, the software displays their progress in a bar along the top of the webpage. The progress bar moves from red, to yellow, to green, and then to blue if they are ahead of pace. The software provides continual feedback, assessment, and incremental victory in a way that a face-to-face teacher with a class of 30 students never could. After each win, students continue to move forward at their own pace. Other blended-learning programs use different approaches to personalize learning. Some maximize the natural ability of online learning to make time variable and learning constant to allow students to progress at their own pace and work on their individual learning needs. A few programs we profiled use face-toface teachers to cull together small groups of students struggling with the same content, an approach that allows for learning to be more individualized but still
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social. Some use online learning to give students access to over a hundred elective courses that before were out of reach. Others offer longer or more flexible hours to accommodate different student and family schedules.
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This is because the interfacesthat is, the place where any two components within the product or service fit togetherare not yet well understood. This pattern plays out in industry after industry. For example, in the early years of the computer industry, IBM was dominant in the first decade with its interdependent architecture and vertical integration. As the mainframe computer improved, a modular architecture dominated beginning in 1964. The cycle repeated in minicomputers, personal computers, and on and on. For a further discussion of this phenomenon and its strategic implications see Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor, The Innovators Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth (Harvard Business School Publishing: Boston, 2003), Chapter 5. The Rise of K12 Blended Learning | 10
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employs its own sales force. Many companies that have tried to do only one piece of this well have struggled or remained smaller players to this point, as there are still too many unpredictable interdependencies between some of these interfaces to allow for reliable modularity. For example, the interdependence between teachers and content has made controlling both of these parts important historically in putting forth a consistently strong product. Melding multiple sources of open content to fashion a coherent, high-quality, trusted curriculum has been even more difficult for the most part. Our interviews with the emerging blended-learning operators make it clear that the raw functionality they need from online products is still lacking. Even more problematic is that the available offerings and different systems are not well integrated; as a result, the different products dont talk to and sync well with each other. One possible reason the K12 online learning industry is still in this immature state, where operators cannot yet snap in different modular pieces of technology easily and create great solutions, is that the historically inhospitable climate of the public K12 education system for start-up companies has scared away private investment capital. Long, complicated, and political district sales cycles make it hard to create a profitable education startup, which has held back the evolution of this industry. There are early signs that this may be changing. With the success of K12, Inc. and others who have followed disruptive paths, there has been an increased flow of private capital as of late into education-technology businesses. This, along with the potential for new funding models that allow more patient capital to enter, may propel education technology forward in the coming years. Across the board, operators stated their desire for education-technology solutions that provide: Integrated systems that support the seamless assimilation of online content from different sources into the student experience, while allowing student achievement data to flow easily across the school in real-time. School operators want a data dashboard that integrates academic progress, attendance, behavioral data, college planning, and so forth all in one place in an actionable and simple format. Hundreds of hours of high-quality dynamic content aligned to standards such that students can stay powerfully engaged during the school year and across years. Early online content often resembled paper textbooks and was not dynamic. Content providers are moving toward more engaging student experiences, but adaptive learning technology is still at a nascent stage and true individualization does not yet exist.
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Technology still needed: Integrated systems Hundreds of hours of high-quality dynamic content Analytics Automation Applications that enhance student motivation
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Analytics that allow operators to provide more effective learning experiences for networks of students. As blended learning rapidly increases the amount of student achievement data available for analysis and shortens assessment cycle times, entrepreneurs will likely create analytic and adaptive software that begins to do this. Automation to simplify educators lives by eliminating low-value manual tasks like attendance and student assessment data entry. Enhanced student motivation through applications that engage and incentivize students in their own learning through social networks, games, and rewards.
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Representatives from Innosight Institute, the Charter School Growth Fund, and Public Impact participated recently in the creation of Digital Learning Now! Headed by former governors Jeb Bush and Bob Wise, Digital Learning Now! offers a policy framework for states to use digital learning to transform the American education system. Its 10 Elements of High-Quality Digital Learning sets the stage for a new approach to education that rewards excellence, leverages teaching talent, and personalizes the educational experience for students at all levels. There are several important components of this policy that states must get right to maximize blended learnings transformational potential, including: Eliminating the cap on the enrollment of students in online or blended-learning programs or courses; Eradicating rules that restrict class size and student-teacher ratios; Abolishing geographic barriers to what online courses students may take; Removing school site definitions that limit blended-learning models where a portion of student learning occurs in traditional school buildings and the rest occurs offsite; Moving to a system where students progress based on their mastery of academic standards or competencies as opposed to seat time or the traditional school calendar; Lifting the rules around certification and licensure to let schools slot paraprofessionals or capable but non-state-certified teachers into appropriate assistive or instructional roles and enable schools to extend the reach of great teachers across multiple, geographically disparate locations; Allowing schools to adopt staffing arrangements and redefine teacher roles according to teacher effectiveness and student needs; Enabling operators to design staffing, pay, curriculum, scheduling, budgets, student discipline, and school culture to meet the needs of their students; Facilitating assessments that can be taken at any time; Creating funding models that allow fractional per-pupil funds to follow students down to the individual course, not just the full-time program; Tying a portion of the per-pupil funds to individual student mastery, whereby states pay bonuses when students achieve mastery at an advanced academic level or students realize the biggest gains between pre- and post-assessment (so as to incentivize programs to serve students who have historically struggled the most);
Policy to support transformative blended learning: Create uncapped autonomous zones for innovation Eliminate inputfocused rules around ratios and certifications Tie funding and scaling to higher accountability around outcomes
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Holding operators to strict accountability measures that allow state and district officials to identify and intervene rapidly in struggling schools and close those that fail repeatedly to meet achievement targets.
Education savings accounts incentivize high-quality outcomes at a lower cost.
There should also be incentives for providers to achieve high-quality outcomes at a lower costand for students and their families to prefer those providers. As a starting point, all programs, regardless of their legal structure, should have access to equivalent funding. But if a program is able to achieve student mastery at a lower cost than the per-pupil funding provides, the program should have the option to invest some of the difference in education savings accounts for its students, who can spend the funds on education-related goods and services, such as college tuition and tutoring. Given that the U.S. spends more per pupil than nearly any other country in the world and that its real per-pupil spending has doubled over the past 40 years with no commensurate gain in outcomes, policy along these lines is vital, particularly as budgets continue to decline over the coming years.
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